How do the object-file and physical-reasoning systems interact? Evidence from priming effects with object arrays or novel labels

Infants can use temporary or scant categorical information to individuate objects

In a standard individuation task, infants see two different objects emerge in alternation from behind a screen. If they can assign distinct categorical descriptors to the two objects, they expect to see both objects when the screen is lowered; if not, they have no expectation at all about what they will see (i.e., two objects, one object, or no object). Why is contrastive categorical information critical for success at this task? According to the kind account, infants must decide whether they are facing a single object with changing properties or two different objects with stable properties, and access to permanent, intrinsic, kind information for each object resolves this difficulty. According to the two-system account, however, contrastive categorical descriptors simply provide the object-file system with unique tags for individuating the two objects and for communicating about them with the physical-reasoning system. The two-system account thus predicts that any type of contrastive categorical information, however temporary or scant it may be, should induce success at the task. Two experiments examined this prediction. Experiment 1 tested 14-month-olds (N = 96) in a standard task using two objects that differed only in their featural properties. Infants succeeded at the task when the object-file system had access to contrastive temporary categorical descriptors derived from the objects' distinct causal roles in preceding support events (e.g., formerly a support, formerly a supportee). Experiment 2 tested 9-month-olds (N = 96) in a standard task using two objects infants this age typically encode as merely featurally distinct. Infants succeeded when the object-file system had access to scant categorical descriptors derived from the objects' prior inclusion in static arrays of similarly shaped objects (e.g., block-shaped objects, cylinder-shaped objects). These and control results support the two-system account's claim that in a standard task, contrastive categorical descriptors serve to provide the object-file system with unique tags for the two objects.

Is core knowledge in the format of LOT?

Object individuation provides a test case for the claim that infants already have a prelinguistic language-of-thought (LOT). By 12 months, infants represent several sortal-kinds: Object, agent, animate, and perhaps artifact. Infants have also encountered many words for object kinds, animals, people, and artifacts, therefore it remains a viable hypothesis that language learning may play a causal role in the acquisition of sortal-kinds, contra Quilty-Dunn et al.

The language-of-thought hypothesis as a working hypothesis in cognitive science

The target article attempted to draw connections between broad swaths of evidence by noticing a common thread: Abstract, symbolic, compositional codes, that is, language-of-thoughts (LoTs). Commentators raised concerns about the evidence and offered fascinating extensions to areas we overlooked. Here we respond and highlight the many specific empirical questions to be answered in the next decade and beyond.

Undercompression errors as evidence for conceptual primitives

The Meaning First Approach offers a model of the relation between thought and language that includes a Generator and a Compressor. The Generator build non-linguistic thought structures and the Compressor is responsible for its articulation through three processes: structure-preserving linearization, lexification, and compression via non-articulation of concepts when licensed. One goal of this paper is to show that a range of phenomena in child language can be explained in a unified way within the Meaning First Approach by the assumption that children differ from adults with respect to compression and, specifically, that they may undercompress in production, an idea that sets a research agenda for the study of language acquisition. We focus on dependencies involving pronouns or gaps in relative clauses and wh-questions, multi-argument verbal concepts, and antonymic concepts involving negation or other opposites. We present extant evidence from the literature that children produce undercompression errors (a type of commission errors) that are predicted by the Meaning First Approach. We also summarize data that children's comprehension ability provides evidence for the Meaning First Approach prediction that decompression should be challenging, when there is no 1-to-1 correspondence.

The best game in town: The reemergence of the language-of-thought hypothesis across the cognitive sciences

Mental representations remain the central posits of psychology after many decades of scrutiny. However, there is no consensus about the representational format(s) of biological cognition. This paper provides a survey of evidence from computational cognitive psychology, perceptual psychology, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and social psychology, and concludes that one type of format that routinely crops up is the language-of-thought (LoT). We outline six core properties of LoTs: (i) discrete constituents; (ii) role-filler independence; (iii) predicate-argument structure; (iv) logical operators; (v) inferential promiscuity; and (vi) abstract content. These properties cluster together throughout cognitive science. Bayesian computational modeling, compositional features of object perception, complex infant and animal reasoning, and automatic, intuitive cognition in adults all implicate LoT-like structures. Instead of regarding LoT as a relic of the previous century, researchers in cognitive science and philosophy-of-mind must take seriously the explanatory breadth of LoT-based architectures. We grant that the mind may harbor many formats and architectures, including iconic and associative structures as well as deep-neural-network-like architectures. However, as computational/representational approaches to the mind continue to advance, classical compositional symbolic structures - that is, LoTs - only prove more flexible and well-supported over time.

Directive Guidance as a Cultural Practice for Learning by Chinese-Heritage Babies

We provide a framework of analysis for Chinese ways of learning that extends beyond the individual level. The theoretical framework focuses on Confucian principles of <i>xiào</i> (孝, filial piety), <i>guăn</i> (管, to govern), and <i>dào dé guān</i> (道德觀, virtues), which leads us to argue that directive guidance as a cultural practice nourishes Chinese-heritage children’s learning as early as in infancy. To illustrate how directive guidance occurs in action for infants, we present an empirical study that examined the interaction of mother-infant dyads in Taipei, Taiwan, when they played with a challenging toy. The dyads co-enacted directive guidance more frequently than their European-American counterparts in the USA – through hand holding, intervening, and collaboration – while infants actively participate in the practice. We discuss the early development of strengths for learning that is fostered through culturally meaningful practices recurrent in parent-infant interaction.

Five-month-old infants attribute inferences based on general knowledge to agents

To make sense of others' actions, we generally consider what information is available to them. This information may come from different sources, including perception and inference. Like adults, young infants track what information agents can obtain through perception: If an agent directly observes an event, for example, young infants expect the agent to have information about it. However, no investigation has yet examined whether young infants also track what information agents can obtain through inference, by bringing to bear relevant general knowledge. Building on the finding that by 4 months of age most infants have acquired the physical rule that wide objects can fit into wide containers but not narrow containers, we asked whether 5-month-olds would expect an agent who was searching for a wide toy hidden in her absence to reach for a wide box as opposed to a narrow box. Infants looked significantly longer when the agent selected the narrow box, suggesting that they expected her (a) to share the physical knowledge that wide objects can fit only into wide containers and (b) to infer that the wide toy must be hidden in the wide box. Three additional conditions supported this interpretation. Together, these results cast doubt on two-system accounts of early psychological reasoning, which claim that infants' early-developing system is too inflexible and encapsulated to integrate inputs from other cognitive processes, such as physical reasoning. Instead, the results support one-system accounts and provide new evidence that young infants' burgeoning psychological-reasoning system is qualitatively similar to that of older children and adults.